rd window, Miko held Anita, his
great hands pawing her with triumphant possessive caresses.

"So, little Anita, you are given back to me!"

XX

Moonlight upon Earth so gently shines to make romantic a lover's
smile! But the reality of the Lunar night is cold beyond human belief.
Cold and darkly silent. Grim desolation. Awesome. Majestic. A frowning
majesty that even to the most intrepid human beholder is inconceivably
forbidding.

And there were humans here now. On this tumbled plain, between
Archimedes and the mountains, one small crater amid the million of its
fellows was distinguished this night by the presence of humans. The
Grantline camp! It huddled in the deepest purple shadows on the side
of a bowl-like pit, a crudely circular orifice with a scant two miles
across its rippling rim. There was faint light here to mark the
presence of the living intruders. The blue glow radiance of Morrell
tube lights under a spread of glassite.

The Grantline camp stood midway up one of the inner cliff walls of the
little crater. The broken, rock-strewn floor, two miles wide, lay five
hundred feet below the camp. Behind it, the jagged, precipitous cliff
rose another five hundred to the heights of the upper rim. A broad
level shelf hung midway up the cliff, and upon it Grantline had built
his little group of glassite dome shelters. Viewed from above there
was the darkly purple crater floor, the upflung circular rim where the
Earthlight tinged the spires and crags with yellow sheen; and on the
shelf, like a huddled group of birds' nests, Grantline's domes hung
and gazed down upon the inner valley.

The air here on the Moon surface was negligible--a scant one
five-thousandth of the atmospheric pressure at the sea level on Earth.
But within the glassite shelter, a normal Earth pressure must be
maintained. Rigidly braced double walls to withstand the explosive
tendency, with no external pressure to counteract it. A tremendous
necessity for mechanical equipment had burdened Grantline's small ship
to capacity. The chemistry of manufactured air, the pressure
equalizers, renewers, respirators, the lighting and temperature
maintenance of a space-flyer was here.

There was this main Grantline building, stretched low and rectangular
along the front edge of the ledge. Within it were living rooms, mess
hall and kitchen. Fifty feet behind it, connected by a narrow passage
of glassite, was a similar though smaller structure. The